A Crowded Life in Comics – Li’l Ricky

by Rick Marschall

A Stir Is Born

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“The child is father to the man,” and all that.

I recently unearthed a clipping from the Bergen Record, August of 1962. It was, and still is, the major daily newspaper of north Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from New York City.

At age 13 I was already a comics fanatic, amateur historian, and collector. For some reason I loved the older comics from the start. A pattern – I like roots music better than contemporary forms of country and jazz. Older women, too, but that’s another column…

Anyway, for any of my friends and neighbors, or current readers, who doubted my love for the old-timers, in the photograph, li’l Ricky is reading a 1905 Hearst section with Happy Hooligan on the front page.

Hooligan is still my favorite comic strip, and F. Opper my favorite cartoonist. It is fun, sometimes, not to grow up.

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